Nineteenth-century observers of the Fuzhou area, both Chinese and Western, were struck by the worship of a group of deities associated with pestilence and epidemic disease. The local people called these gods the Five Emperors (Wudi). To Justus Doolittle, an American missionary stationed in Fuzhou, Proclaimed Zuo Zongtang, Governor-General of Fujian and Zhejiang: “the rival societies for getting up processions to parade the idols have from the beginning violated the law and corrupted morals, hence the evil must be stopped without delay” (Zuo 1867, 22). While these two observers each brought his own concern to bear on his perceptions of popular belief and ritual practice, they were united in their focus on the dangers the worship of these deities posed to public morality and order; neither was much interested in the identities or histories of these gods. But a detailed investigation of their identities and histories may explain how the deities were perceived as dangerous to public morality and order, and offers rich insight into the social history of Late Imperial China.

This essay examines the importance of Chinese nation-building in the contemporary era. Defining nation-building in terms of processes that help to bridge local differences especially but not only when also distinguishing China from the rest the world, I argue that a focus on globalization has masked the importance of Chinese nation-building to contemporary social change. I analyze three very different societal arenas in which national forms of commonality are being constructed: the consolidation of the education system, the expansion of the urban built environment, and the spread of the Chinese Internet. Though each arena illustrates a very different aspect of the nation-building process, they all result in an increased degree of commonality in lived experience and communicative practice across China.

Analyses of Thai political economy since World War II have sought to define the stages of Thai social evolution from earliest times to the present and to determine whether or not the Bowring Treaty of 1855 and the 1932 coup mark changes in the social formation and/or the mode of production. Over the past decade, as a consequence of political change in the mid-1970s, a new generation of historians has rejuvenated Marxist methodology, using it to pry the chronicles and archives away from royalist and nationalist myth-making concerns, to dismantle the court-centered historiography, and to erect a new historical paradigm for the late twentieth century.

In some areas of the Philippines, three important and interrelated changes in the traditional pattern of local leadership recruitment and faction organization had been taking place for several decades. Notables from old leading families were being replaced in positions of leadership by upwardly mobile “new men” from more humble backgrounds. Professional politicians were emerging in the local arena. Local factions were being transformed from traditional family-centered organizations into specialized machines. These changes were most likely to occur in areas of comparatively high social mobilization and low concentration of landownership. Changes are explained primarily by the impact of increasingly intense national political competition in rural communities and growing mass participation. These changes represent a decline in the autonomy of local elites, as they were accompanied by the latters' growing reliance on central resources to maintain their machines. These changes and the forces behind them are well illustrated by the pattern of political change in the town of Taal, Batangas during this century, which is reported in great detail.

During the late Ming an entirely new charitable institution, the benevolent society (t'ung-shan t'ang), emerged even though there were already in place channels for charity provided by lineage organizations, religious institutions, and the state. To account for the appearance of benevolent societies, this article attempts explanations in terms of worsening conditions and dynastic decline and then moves beyond such considerations for several reasons. Although China had long experienced much poverty and numerous periods of extreme social unrest, it was not until the late Ming that the responses to these maladies took the form of benevolent societies. Although the benevolent societies were sometimes founded in an atmosphere of social tension, they endured long after any sense of crisis had passed and thrived through periods of calm. The benevolent societies arose because they satisfied—in ways that existing forms of charity could not—the emotional and social needs of the sponsors in an environment altered by commerce. To achieve a harmonious society, officials and gentry acquiesced to the investment mentality of merchants, and by making charitable contributions toward a moral society, merchants justified their wealth. Highly visible and tolerated by the state, the benevolent societies expressed social alliances based on money and a spirit of civic pride.

Historians frequently describe the Russo-Japanese War as a time when Japan achieved great power status, won world acclaim, and fulfilled the Meiji dream. It was a landmark in modern world history: everywhere leaders of sujected peoples were inspired to believe that they too could import Western science and industry, rid themselves of white control, preserve their national character, and themselves oversee the process of industrialization. Jawaharlal Nehru, for example, records in his autobiography that the Japanese victories were a memorable event in his early life, describing them as “a great pick-me-up for Asia” which kindled his nationalism and his determination to “fight for India.” Eager to learn more of the Japanese experience, “I invested in a large number of books on Japan and tried to read some of them.” But he confesses ruefully (perhaps recalling an account of Bakumatsu politics?) “I felt rather lost in Japanese history.”!

It began with the Phoenicians. Most written languages now use their invention— a phonetic alphabet. The invention of alphabetic writing escorted an influential theory of language onto the intellectual stage. Aristotle expressed the basic outline of that theory, which has since dominated Indo-European views of language:

Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of the spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of—affections in the soul—are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of— actual things-are also the same.

During the first half of the twentieth century, new mass media practices radically altered traditional cultural forms and performance in a complex encounter that incited much debate, criticism, and celebration the world over. This essay examines how the new sound media of gramophone and sound cinema took up the live performance genres of Tamil drama. Professor Hughes argues that south Indian music recording companies and their products prefigured, mediated, and transcended the musical relationship between stage drama and Tamil cinema. The music recording industry not only transformed Tamil drama music into a commodity for mass circulation before the advent of talkies but also mediated the musical relationship between Tamil drama and cinema, helped to create film songs as a new and distinct popular music genre, and produced a new mass culture of film songs.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the primary fault line in American studies of Japan lay not between “Japan-bashers” and “Japanapologists,” but between those who presented the history of Japan in terms of an ongoing process of modernization and those who did not. During the 1970s, younger scholars of Japan attacked modernization theory with considerable passion (see Dower 1975), eliciting rather defensive responses from its practitioners. The 1980s saw the emergence of yet another, though somewhat smaller, generation of American scholars, which has been not so much anti-modernizationist as non-modernizationist. Like the critics of the 1970s, historians of this newest generation have dealt with conflict, social problems, and state repression, but most no longer believe it necessary to discuss the problems raised by modernization theory.

Unsurprisingly, writings on the economic history of nineteenth and twentieth century China have been confusing and full of controversy. A major question is whether the Chinese economy experienced per capita output growth, stagnated, or declined between 1870 and World War II. Studies prior to 1937 usually claimed that the rural economy's output per capita declined, with only modest expansion of a small, modern sector restricted to railroads and manufacturing firms, and that this modern sector declined during the great world depression of the 1930s (Myers 1970:13–18; Ozaki 1939; Tawney 1932). A few studies of the 1960s and 1970s generally confirmed this view (Eastman 1974:chap. 5; Paauw 1952:3–26). Various theories attempted to explain this continuing or deepening poverty in China, including some, such as Ch'en Han-seng's, that emphasized exploitation or the misdistribution of wealth (Myers 1970).

This article examines family planning during the Emergency in India, drawing upon the archive of the Shah Commission of Inquiry. It aims, primarily, to understand why family planning became such an important point of state intervention during the Emergency, when millions were sterilized. I argue that family planning was intended as a technocratic fix for the problem of poverty and that, although the family planning program existed before the Emergency, it received a fillip through Indira Gandhi's Emergency-era push for poverty eradication thanks to the established position of population control as a prerequisite for economic development. Secondly, it aims to understand how the Emergency and sterilization have become conflated in popular memory, such that the driving forces of poverty eradication and economic development have dropped out of the story altogether. The link between poverty eradication and population control has been forgotten, and a narrative of arbitrary family planning “excess” endured.

This paper analyzes how democracy is conceptualized and operationalized among Tibetan exiles based on fieldwork conducted among Tibetans in Dharamsala during 1994 and in two settlements in Nepal throughout 1995. The Tibetan exiles are in a democratic transition, yet their transition resembles much more of a “muddling through” than a linear progression, as they struggle to interpret democratic values in the context of their own worldview and political circumstances. The Tibetan exiles' case can be interpreted as a new variation on the Asian democracy debate, with a focus on how authoritarian and popular choice interrelate in an actually existing democratic system. For the Tibetans, the issue is the place of the “enlightened mind” in modern forms of governance. The author finds that the exile context has both facilitated and limited the Tibetans' reform efforts.

The harmonium is both widely played and widely condemned in India. During the Indian independence movement, both British and Indian scholars condemned the harmonium for embodying an unwelcome foreign musical sensibility. It was consequently banned from All-India Radio from 1940 to 1971, and still is only provisionally accepted on the national airwaves. The debate over the harmonium hinged on putative sonic differences between India and the modern West, which were posited not by performers, but by a group of scholars, composers, and administrators, both British and Indian. The attempt to banish the sound of the harmonium was part of an attempt to define a national sound for India, distinct from the West. Its continued use in education served a somewhat different national project: to standardize Indian music practice. This paper examines the intertwined aesthetic and political ideals that underlie the harmonium controversy.

On june 15, 1936, 120 fresh cadets assembled at Manila's Tutuban Station to board a train for the Philippine Military Academy (PMA), recently established in the mountain city of Baguio. At the end of the line, the cadets changed to Benguet Auto Line buses for the 4,000-foot climb up the zig-zag road to Baguio. As the buses pulled into the campus, some forty upperclassmen, all transfers from the superseded Constabulary Academy, were waiting to greet the new arrivals with a ritual called “hazing.” Even fifty years later, these cadets would recall their reception as traumatic (J. Mendoza 1986, 16).

Nomadic states in Inner Asia were generated by external relations with state societies. Because the Hsiung-nu state could not have supported itself by exploiting the relatively undifferentiated and extensive pastoral economy, the state hierarchy was financed by exploiting the resources available from outside of the steppe. The nomads on the steppe were organized into a powerful military force that was used to systematically exploit the Chinese economy. The Hsiung-nu raided the frontier directly and then used the disruptions they caused as a tool to extort trade and subsidies from the Han court, thus maintaining a monopoly on this flow of Han goods to the steppe, which gave it great economic power and stability. The imperial level of Hsiung-nu government was therefore primarily concerned with conducting foreign affairs, organizing military campaigns, and maintaining unity on the steppe, while it ceded power in domestic affairs to indigenous tribal leaders. This created an imperial confederacy that acted as an autocratically ruled state in its dealings with China but that remained federally structured internally. This form of organization proved remarkably stable and provided the model for later empires established by nomads on the steppe.

In the lowlands of nainital district in northwestern Uttar Pradesh, occupying discrete and adjacent territories, live two ethnic groups known as the Tharu and the Buxa.1 Both are indigenous to the area. They have much in common, in their dress, language, and ritual practices, and their origin myths even posit a shared ancestry for both groups (Hasan 1979). Despite these similarities, the two groups consider themselves to be distinct peoples or jāt (Stewart 1865, 148; Hasan 1979); they do not intermarry, although elopements (socially disapproved unions) are not uncommon. Both are listed as Scheduled Tribes in the Indian Constitution, a status that entitles them to special protection and benefit in education and government service. The Buxas live in the westernmost part of the district, while the Rana Tharu to their east also live in large numbers in the adjacent Nepali district of Kanchanpur.

By the time the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–35) issued the above edict in January 1728, criticism of Beijing's new confrontational approach toward the native chieftains of southwest China had already reached embarrassing proportions. With increasing frequency, civilian and military officials in Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Sichuan referred to the state's abolition of native chieftainships as “senseless,” “a plan devoid of vision and purpose,” and “wantonly destructive of life and property.” Ortai (1680–1745), Yue Zhongqi (1686–1754), and several other officials recently assigned to the southwest by Yongzheng were labeled “reckless opportunists” intent on inciting disturbances among native chieftains and the indigenous non-Han peoples of southwest China in order to further their careers (ZPYZ, He Shiji 2a–3b; Ding Shijie 16b; Ortai 1:95a–b; Famin 21a–24b; YZSL 46:20b–21b). According to one influential official assigned to the southwest, “Your humble servant takes this opportunity to inform [the emperor] of the devastation and misery caused by [Ortai's] actions, in hope this policy towards native chieftains will be brought to an end and we can resume the strategy of peaceful assimilation initiated during previous reigns” (ZPZZ, Zu Binggui 1772.6).

Millenarian movements provide a dramatic expression of discontent with the present order and an anticipation of its imminent and radical transformation. When they arise within a context of cultural confrontation, in which the limits of an indigenous culture are seen for the first time against the perspective of an advanced—and advancing—civilization, they may at times incorporate within their vision of the millenial condition some of the desirable aspects of that civilization. Indeed, under suitable circumstances movements that begin with chiliastic expectations may end by passing to major involvement with larger societies and the modern world. It is not a common condition, to be sure, and has recently been discounted. “Millenialism,” observes Bellah, “… could contribute only under very special conditions to social innovation, for it was usually a symptom of severe social pathology. Its consequences were often destructive, or the energies it released were quickly rechanneled into traditional forms….”

In the entire body of scholarly writing—Japanese and foreign—on modern Japanese history, perhaps no subject has been treated with less care or greater indifference than the imperial universities. Western scholars, when commenting on the subject, are usually content to note their supposed indebtedness to the universities of nineteenth-century Germany and to emphasize their role in training government officials. Thus Robert Scalapino wrote in 1962: “The government … accepted a far-reaching system of education patterned essentially after German concepts….”; he was seconded in this opinion by Ronald P. Dore in 1965. And of the universities' social functions, Herbert Passin wrote in 1965 that Tokyo University had been conceived as a “training school for officials”; this was echoed by Chitoshi Yanaga in 1968.